More than half the world's population lives in urban areas. A mega city is a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of ten million people. Urban or metropolitan areas have to cope with major challenges such as traffic congestion or environmental problems including air pollution. Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms into the atmosphere. The urban areas have significant problems with smog (e.g., a type of air pollution derived from vehicle emissions from combustion engines and industrial fumes that react in the atmosphere with sunlight to form secondary pollutants that also combine with the primary emissions to form photochemical smog). Smog may be caused by large amounts of coal burning that create a mixture of smoke and sulfur dioxide.
An urban area or city is a complex system including a plurality of infrastructure elements. Infrastructure is a technical structure that includes, for example, roads, bridges, water supply, electrical grids, and telecommunication facilities. The essential infrastructure categories are building and transport facilities of the city. Hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure may be distinguished between. Hard infrastructure refers to physical entities provided for the function of urban areas, where soft infrastructure may refer to institutions that are provided to maintain economic, health and cultural standards such as, for example, the financial system and education system or health care system. Infrastructures of an urban area include mostly transport infrastructure, energy infrastructure, communication infrastructure and waste management infrastructure. Hard infrastructure entities may serve the function of conveyance or channelling of people, vehicles, fluids, energy or information data. These infrastructure entities may include networks for transporting or channelling objects in the urban area. Infrastructure systems of the urban area include infrastructure elements and/or infrastructure networks and the control systems and the software used to operate, manage and monitor these infrastructure systems, as well as any accessory buildings, plants or vehicles that form an integral part of the infrastructure system. This includes fleets of vehicles operating according to a schedule such as public transport busses or garbage collection vehicles. Further infrastructure systems of an urban area may also include energy or communication facilities that are not usually part of a physical network such as radio and television broadcasting facilities or oil refineries.
The choice of infrastructure measures or infrastructure entities does have a major impact on the urban area. These impacts include technical impacts as well as economic impacts. Important technical impacts of the infrastructure of a city are the environmental effects caused by the infrastructure entities such as greenhouse gas emissions or particulate matter (PM) emissions in the urban area. When planning the infrastructure of an urban area, the involved infrastructure impacts are to be considered. For the very early phase of the planning, there are no sufficient methods available. Possible infrastructure impacts of planned infrastructure entities are only estimated, and any calculations are done mainly singularly on the basis of generic data or reference projects. These kinds of calculations are very time-consuming and cumbersome and lead to very poor results because the calculations are unsystematic. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for providing infrastructure impacts on an urban area that overcome the above-mentioned drawbacks.